Deathscapes

Latest Case Studies

Sarah Lee Circle Bear was a 25-year old Native American mother who died while in custody at the Brown County Jail in Aberdeen, South Dakota. On July 3rd, Circle Bear was arrested following a traffic accident and placed in Roberts County Jail. Later, she was moved to Brown County. Throughout her stay in jail, Circle Bear demonstrated signs of detrimental physical health as she was shuffled between jail cells. No one really bothered to help her. On July 5th, she was found unresponsive in her jail cell.

This case study documents the spaces and contexts in which Indigenous women die outside the formal custody of the state: on the streets; on the open road; in their own homes or at the edges of communities. In these spaces, although outside of its carceral confines, the violence of the settler state is enacted through diverse practices that render Indigenous women’s lives unsafe and produce their deaths.

We use the term femicide to underline that the incidence of Indigenous women’s deaths in these disparate places is not accidental or random, but a systematic outcome of the logic of settler colonialism.

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Deathscapes

Acknowledgments

The research on this website is primarily funded by the Australian Research Council, for the project ‘Deathscapes: Mapping Race and State Violence in Settler Societies’ under its Discovery Projects Scheme (DP 160100303).

In year 1 and 2 partial funding was received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada, for the project ‘Racial Violence in Settler Societies: An Interactive Multi-Media Site of State Violence Against Indigenous and Racialized Peoples’ under its Partnership Development Grants scheme (890-2014-002). CI: Professor Sherene Razack; Community partners: Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto (Christa Big Canoe, Director); African Canadian Legal Clinic (Margaret Parsons, Director); Centre for Aboriginal Health Education at University of Manitoba (Dr Barry Lavallee, Director); Indigenous Social Justice Association, Sydney (the late Ray Jackson, founding Director).

We thank the School of Media, Culture & Creative Arts and the Australia-Asia-Pacific Institute at Curtin University for early development funding.

Thanks also to our design and development team (Tommy Segoro, Deanne Bowen and Claude De Lucia at Diversus and Jeffrey Effendi at DrawHistory) for their care, creativity and meticulous attention to detail.

Special thanks to Mike Sowerby of the Centre for Aboriginal Studies at Curtin University for his invaluable insights and advice in developing the courtyard garden.

We are grateful to the artists, photographers and poets who have generously allowed us to feature their work on this site. All copyright for their work remains with them. All efforts have been made to contact each artist whose work is reproduced here. We ask anyone we have not yet managed to reach to please contact us at [email protected]